"The whole thing was so absurd," she laughed as she told Ellen’s audience.

"Tom puts on these shorts, his oldest gym shorts, and they're tiny," she explained.

"And they're like really short and there's nothing underneath so he gets on his bicycle to ride there and I'm like, 'WHOA. Babe, you cannot wear those shorts. They're like — you can see everything.' And he's like 'C'mon. Who are we going to run into?'"

And that’s how Tom tempted fate, because who did they see in the gym but Ellen DeGeneres, her wife Portia de Rossi and former Barack Obama on the treadmills.

"In a gym that is tiny! It was a very confined space, and we then had to do this whole, like, class, this stretching class and Tom meanwhile is trying to like, not reveal anything. And he's dying and I'm crying so much, I'm about to crack a rib."

As the couple tried to take part in a stretch session with a personal trainer, all poor husband Tom could think about was a bit of slippage in his less-than-modest shorts, with Margot saying Tom’s face showed he was “having the worst day of his life”.

"Ellen looks over and says 'Boy those were the wrong shorts to wear today!"'